Tim Hunt

Pierre asked me to say something about this in another thread.

At the moment, I am entirely focussed on the next OU release, which will roughtly coincide with Moodle 1.8. That means:

• Improved quiz navigation and a summary page at the end of an attempt. (being worked on my my colleague Mahmoud.)
• Something I am calling Opaque, which is quite cool, but won't be immediately useful to anyone outside the OU.
• Bug fixing. (Including picking up the patches that a few wonderful people have attached to tracker issues, and which lack of time has caused my to shamefully ignore.)

This will keep us busy until about the end of January.

Further ahead of that plans are vague at the moment. At the OU we are in the process of setting our priorities for next year, and no decisions have been finalised. Of course, the quiz is just one part of our work on Moodle, so I am waiting to see what our planning people think the priorities are, and how much of our development can be on the quiz. I hope the answer is quite a lot. I can tell you some of the things we think are important, but I can't yet tell you which, if any will be done, or when.

Stability and reliability

It seems that whenever you fix one bug in the quiz, you introduce another. The code is so complicated that it is hard to be sure of all the consequences of a particular change. Also, with so many options, it is virtually impossible to do thorough testing by hand. So we want to build up a large suite of automated tests that work though the common operations and combinations of settings. Then after any change, we can run the tests, which will then give us confidence that nothing has broken. It's not very exciting, except maybe to developers, but we think it is vital.

Quiz layout

Make it more consistent. I don't know how much of this will be in the standard theme, and how much will be in the OU theme.

Make adaptive quetsions work better

We like adaptive questions, but the way they work in moodle at the moment is not great.

Gradebook improvements

Actually Martin D and moodle.com will probably be the ones who do this, but we are very intereted in the outcome.

Gradebook import/export

We want a way to adding grading information from other OU systems in the Moodle gradebook, and ways of transmitting Moodle results into other OU databases. Of course, all that is OU specific, but I think our approach will be to create generic mechanism for transporting results (maybe based of IMS QTI results reporting), so our work will be useful to others.

Improve the questiontype API

So it is easier for people to write new question types, and then for other people to install them.

Some new question types

If we have any time left over, this would be some fun development to do.

Is there some reason why we start all our CVS tag names with 'MOODLE_'. It seems a bit redundant.

More to the point, Eclipse (my editor) does autocomplete on CVS tags, but the fact they all start with the same 7 characters renders that useless.

Could we at least separate out the release tags/branches MOODLE_17_STABLE, MOODLE_17_MREGED, etc, which I think are fine as they are, and the development branches like MOODLE_18_GROUPS.

Maybe in future development branches should get called something like DEV_18_GROUPS.

Just a thought.

Martin has just posted an interesting article to MoodleDocs: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Pedagogy.

If you have heard one of MDs talks at a Moodle conference, you won't find much new here, but it is still a very nice summary.

If you have not, then I hightly recomment this article. It tells you exactly where Moodle is coming from.

(For those of you who don't know, QuestionMark is a commercial web-based assessment system.)

One of the gaps in Moodle's range of question import filters is that there is no importer for QuestionMark files. (QuestionMark can export it's questions in a custom XML format called QML.) This was a problem for us at the OU since some of our courses were using it and we had over 1500 questions in our question bank that we wanted to move them to Moodle.

For us, the simplest solution was to contract out the conversion of the QML files to Moodle XML format that we could then import. The person who did this for us was Jalshan Sabir (jalshan.sabir@strath.ac.uk), and she did a really excellent job. I just wanted to pass on the tip that if anyone else needed the same sort of job doing, they could try asking her.

Of course, what would be really great would be if someone could write a QML inporter for Moodle, but that would be more work.

Recently (27th October) Urs made some changes to the .clearfix CSS in the standard theme to make it work with IE7.

In the standard theme, this CSS seems to work.

In our OU brand theme, which is the standard theme with a few customisations none of which should interact with .clearfix, the place where students are supposed to enter their answers to quiz questions are not appearing. (There may be other breakage too, I don't know.)

Deleting the 'overflow: hidden;' from the .clearfix rule fixes this aspect of our theme in IE6, but I am worried that it might break something else, or break other browsers.

So I was hoping Urs could explain what the overflow: hidden; is for. Thanks.


P.S. I have to say, the whole clearfix thing is seriously wierd voodoo.